Nothing but blackness above
And nothing moves but the cars—
God, in return for our love,
Fling us a handful of stars."
These lamps are the footlights the miners hold up to Old King Coal as they pierce his sides with their electric drills, and wrench open his wounds with their ripping charges of dynamite. They call this shooting the coal, so it is just as well to keep your peculiar fantasies to yourself.
In a coal-mine one loses his sense of direction, for there is no heaven above, no earth beneath—nothing but silence and black impenetrableness.
And yet, when you are alone in a mine, you may hear a sound like the sighing of great trees. This is probably the utterance of your own blood to which you are giving audience as when you put your ear to a conch-shell; or it may be the surging sigh of the enormous primitive ferns, sigillarias and lepidodendrons who lay down in these strata as though for an eternal rest. In the counting-house of the years, vast cycles have come and gone till, now in these impertinent days of dynamite and electricity, uncouth, ungentle men have broken their rest forever. The complaint of the trees is not without judgment. The thing seems ill-done and almost, of myself, I can hear their tragical murmurings.
The temperature in the coal-mine does not vary with the seasons, and the men believe it healthier to work in this underworld than to be subject to the changes of climate above. They have also told me that there is no echo in a coal stratum. I do not know if this be true, but, of a surety, one's voice does not carry far in the dead air, and even the shots of dynamite seem to be muffled and indistinct. Nevertheless, it is my opinion—an irrational one, no doubt—that men who dig in mines should have music rather than men who eat in cafés. We need to recast our ideas about these things.
It makes no difference how you have quarrelled with these miners in a strike; it makes no difference that once you felt like murdering them in bulk, it is impossible to follow them day after day through the working of a coal-mine without seeing something heroic in their crude bent figures. You may not be able to understand the language they speak, for many of them are foreign born, but in time you come to talk to them through the smile, the touch on the arm, or the clap of the hands, which signals are, after all, the universal language of the world. Most of these men are kindly disposed and, when left free from the machinations of the lawyer, are capable of self-sacrifice for their employer, and even of affection. In every gang of men, whether in railway construction, lumber camp, or coal-mine, there is always an unamiable workman of ferocious egoism who is known as the camp lawyer. The legal fraternity will probably resent this misuse of their name, and properly so, for this fellow is froward in manner and has the same loving heart as a tiger. He it is who stirs up all the internal strifes and keeps them at boiling point. It is an art in which he greatly excels. In olden days, they called a man of his ilk a gallows knave, and the epithet was selected with care. Foremen are, nowadays, beginning to pay less attention to the communion of saints in their camps and vastly more to the communion of sinners. It is a foreman's particular business to spot the lawyers early in the game and to deal with them as the occasion warrants.
There are many things to be observed down in these black entrails of the earth, but, before we leave, we will look at the stables. They are lighted by electricity. It is the work of the horses to haul the cars to the main entry where they are switched on to the electric cable. It is commonly believed that horses who live in mines become blind. This is not true. What they lose is their sense of colour, for in the dark all things are hueless. These horses are fat-fleshed and healthy, and are so tame they can almost be mesmerized into talking to you. They seem highly interested in the story I tell them of how once the Frenchmen put twelve thousand dead men and their horses down three coal-pits at Jemappes, and things like that. They appreciate carrots, sugar-lumps and apples, which have been steadily purloined from the cook's pantry at the bunk-house, in a way that is positively human. It would be unkind to enter the mine without carrying a treat for the horses, but now, having done so, let me bid all of you on the day-shift a very good fortune, and a safe return to God's blessed sunshine.